eDiscovery Daily Blog

• March 5, 2018

Actually, it’s not a “conference” so much as it’s a “summit” – the Summit On Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID).  SOLID is an interactive exchange of ideas by doers, innovators and disruptors in the business of law. Speakers and participants will inform, instruct and inspire one another to design and apply solutions that will elevate and accelerate their careers from ‘now’ to ‘next’.  The SOLID West 2018 summit is coming up this month in San Francisco on Thursday, March 15, 2018 (here’s a link to the agenda for the SOLID West summit).

Last week, I spoke with David Cowen, President and Managing Director of The Cowen Group, (which, as many of you know, is a staffing and recruiting firm focused on eDiscovery, Litigation Support, Privacy, Security and Information Governance professionals) and organizer of the SOLID summit program and asked him how SOLID summits are different from other conferences:

“It’s a summit series effecting change at the individual professional level as opposed to the industrial level.  In these summits, individuals can come together and experience a series of TED talks, then connect with peers and colleagues through a series of table talks and then a town hall”, David said.  “These aren’t discussions about what people are thinking and predicting will happen, they are discussions about what people are doing within their organizations today.  There’s no pontification, there’s no “what if”.  It’s all experiential knowledge being shared – what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, why they did it this way and lessons learned.  Focused on the business use case of the technology and what it can do to move your career forward and your business forward.  And, that’s a real differentiator from conferences where people are talking about the next big idea.”

“This ‘TED talk, table talk, town hall’ approach, which is facilitated by the experienced 55 faculty members, helps create a hub of conversation around evolving trends and use cases in the business of law today.  By the ‘business of law’, I mean that critical intersection between next gen legal technology (which includes AI and machine learning, among other technologies) and the impact that’s having on the business of law and the careers of professionals that are trying to innovate and get from ‘now’ to ‘next’.  At the end of each summit, each participant at SOLID gets a 90 day action plan to fill out to identify what each of them will do in the next 90 days to take action on what they just learned, followed up by six working groups conducting ten virtual calls over a six month period (and completing two work product deliverables) to keep enforcing ‘stickiness’ and ‘accountability’.  If you want to go to a ‘mini MBA program’, this is the place to be.”

David also indicated that, in addition to the two SOLID summits each year in San Francisco and New York (and perhaps eventually regional summits as well), they’re also planning to roll out a breakfast workshop series on how to get from ‘now’ to ‘next’ in your career.  As David told me, “It will be a two hour ‘boot camp’ that we’ll conduct in ten cities in the spring, summer and fall of 2018 focused on what it takes to be successful in the business of law.  The idea is that if you don’t take an interest in your own career development and advancement, you’re going to be gone.  And, we want to help people get from ‘gone’ to ‘good’ to ‘golden’.

Golden, indeed!  The SOLID summit series began with the first summit last fall in New York and will return to New York for SOLID East 2018 on September 13 and 14.  To register for the SOLID West 2018 summit (there’s still time!), click here.  This summit is SOLID as a rock!

CloudNine is excited to be a sponsor and participant in the SOLID summit series and my colleague, Julia Romero Peter, will be at the SOLID West summit later this month.

So, what do you think?  Is your career ‘golden’?  Or are you concerned that if you’re not careful, you could be ‘gone’?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.